Al-Qaeda strategists have been assisting the Taliban fight
against U.S.-NATO forces in Afghanistan because they believe
that foreign occupation has been the biggest factor in
generating Muslim support for uprisings against their
governments, according to the just-published book by Syed
Saleem Shahzad, the Pakistani journalist whose body was found
in a canal outside Islamabad last week with evidence of having
been tortured.

That al-Qaeda view of the U.S.-NATO war in Afghanistan, which
Shahzad reports in the book based on conversations with several senior
al-Qaeda commanders, represents the most authoritative picture of the
organization’s thinking available to the public.

Shahzad’s book Inside Al-Qaeda and the Taliban was published on May
24—only three days before he went missing from Islamabad on his way
to a television interview. His body was found May 31.

Shahzad, who had been the Pakistan bureau chief for the Hong Kong-based Asia Times, had unique access to senior al-Qaeda commanders and
cadres, as well as those of the Afghan Taliban and the Pakistani
Taliban organizations. His account of al-Qaeda strategy is
particularly valuable because of the overall ideological system and
strategic thinking that emerged from many encounters Shahzad had with
senior officials over several years.

Shahzad’s account reveals that Osama bin Laden was a “figurehead” for
public consumption, and that it was Dr. Ayman Zawahiri who formulated
the organization’s ideological line or devised operational plans.

Shahzad summarizes the al-Qaeda strategy as being to “win the war
against the West in Afghanistan” before shifting the struggle to
Central Asia and Bangladesh. He credits al-Qaeda and its militant
allies in North and South Waziristan with having transformed the
tribal areas of Pakistan into the main strategic base for the Taliban
resistance to U.S.-NATO forces.

But Shahzad’s account makes it clear that the real objective of Al-
Qaeda in strengthening the Taliban struggle against U.S.-NATO forces
in Afghanistan was to continue the U.S.-NATO occupation as an
indispensable condition for the success of Al-Qaeda’s global strategy
of polarizing the Islamic world.

Shahzad writes that al-Qaeda strategists believed its terrorist
attacks on 9/11 would lead to a U.S. invasion of Afghanistan which
would in turn cause a worldwide “Muslim backlash.” That “backlash”
was
particularly important to what emerges in Shahzad’s account as the
primary al-Qaeda aim of stimulating revolts against regimes in Muslim
countries.

Shahzad reveals that the strategy behind the 9/11 terrorist attacks
and the large al-Qaeda ambitions to reshape the Muslim world came
from
Zawahiri’s “Egyptian camp” within al-Qaeda. That group, under
Zawahiri’s leadership, had already settled on a strategic vision by
the mid-1990s, according to Shahzad.

The Zawahiri group’s strategy, according to Shahzad, was to “speak
out
against corrupt and despotic Muslim governments and make them targets
to destroy their image in the eyes of the common people.” But they
would do so by linking those regimes to the United States.

In a 2004 interview cited by Shahzad, one of bin Laden’s
collaborators, Saudi opposition leader Saad al-Faqih, said Zawahiri
had convinced bin Laden in the late 1990s that he had to play on the
U.S. “cowboy” mentality that would elevate him into an “implacable
enemy” and “produce the Muslim longing for a leader who could
successfully challenge the West.”

Shahzad makes it clear that the U.S. occupations of Afghanistan and
Iraq were the biggest break al-Qaeda had ever gotten. Muslim
religious
scholars had issued decrees for the defense of Muslim lands against
the non-Muslim occupiers on many occasions before the U.S.-NATO war
in
Afghanistan, Shahzad points out.

But once such religious decrees were extended to Afghanistan,
Zawahiri
could exploit the issue of the U.S. occupation of Muslim lands to
organize a worldwide “Muslim insurgency.” That strategy depended on
being able to provoke discord within societies by discrediting
regimes
throughout the Muslim world as not being truly Muslim.

Shahzad writes that the al-Qaeda strategists became aware that Muslim
regimes—particularly Saudi Arabia—had become active in trying to
end the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan by 2007, because they feared
that
as long as they continued “there was no way of stopping Islamist
revolts and rebellions in Muslim countries.”

What al-Qaeda leaders feared most, as Shahzad’s account makes clear,
was any move by the Taliban toward a possible negotiated
settlement—even based on the complete withdrawal of U.S. troops.
Al-Qaeda strategists portrayed the first “dialogue” with the Afghan
Taliban sponsored by the Saudi king in 2008 as an extremely dangerous
U.S. plot—a view scarcely supported by the evidence from the U.S. side.

Those differences surfaced in 2005, when Mullah Omar sent a message
to all factions in North and South Waziristan to abandon all other
activities and join forces with the Taliban in Afghanistan. And when
al-Qaeda declared the “khuruj” (popular uprising against a Muslim ruler
for un-Islamic governance) against the Pakistani state in 2007, Omar
opposed that strategy, even though it was ostensibly aimed at deterring
U.S. attacks on the Taliban.

Shahzad reports that the one of al-Qaeda’s purposes in creating the
Pakistani Taliban in early 2008 was to “draw the Afghan Taliban away
from Mullah Omar’s influence.”

The Shahzad account refutes the official U.S. military rationale for
the war in Afghanistan, which is based on the presumption that al-Qaeda
is primarily interested in getting the U.S. and NATO forces out of
Afghanistan and that the Taliban and al-Qaeda are locked in a tight
ideological and strategic embrace.

Shahzad’s account shows that despite cooperative relations with
Pakistan’s ISI in the past, al-Qaeda leaders decided after 9/11 that
the Pakistani military would inevitably become a full partner in the
U.S. “war on terror” and would turn against al-Qaeda.

The relationship did not dissolve immediately after the terror
attacks, according to Shahzad. He writes that ISI chief Mehmood Ahmed
assured al-Qaeda when he visited Kandahar in September 2001 that the
Pakistani military would not attack al-Qaeda as long it didn’t attack
the military.

He also reports that Pakistani president Pervez Musharraf held a
series of meetings with several top jihadi and religious leaders and
asked them to lie low for five years, arguing that the situation
could
change after that period. According to Shahzad’s account, al-Qaeda
did
not intend at the beginning to launch a jihad in Pakistan against the
military but was left with no other option when the Pakistani
military
sided with the U.S. against the jihadis.

The major turning point was an October 2003 Pakistani military
helicopter attack in North Waziristan which killed many militants. In
apparent retaliation in December 2003, there were two attempts on
Musharraf’s life, both organized by a militant whom Shahzad says was
collaborating closely with al-Qaeda.

In his last interview with The Real News Network, however, Shahzad
appeared to contradict that account, reporting that ISI had wrongly
told Musharraf that al-Qaeda was behind the attempts, and even that
there was some Pakistani air force involvement in the plot.